Hell March
by Flatlander
Summary: Based on Doom 3 retelling. James Garrison, a scientist in Delta Labs 2, learns of the demonic invasion and fights his way through the different sectors of the UAC base towards Mars City in an effort to escape. Chapter 2's up. R&R?
1. On the Warpath

Everyone gets their fifteen minutes of fame and/or glory, but in my case it was 48 hours of the latter. The name James Garrison is not likely to appear in history books, but the experience was indefinably magnificent, and that's almost certainly all that matters. What glory, however, is the question. To answer that, I propose another: What exactly _is _expected of a scientist who works 18 hours a day at one of the largest armories in a confining laboratory at an even more claustrophobic Mars base when he learns that demons from hell invade and begin a seemingly unstoppable onslaught? Well, it's probable that most people would assume that he'd hide in some obscure ventilation shaft…immaterial. _I _chose a secondary approach to this anomaly. Delta Labs 2 was not a very long way from the monorail, but it was a very long way from Mars City. So on November 15, 2145, I brought two plasma guns with me – an excellent decision, as I later found out – to protect myself as I tried to secure a flight back to Earth, or at least to one of the neighboring moons.

But this defensive mindset mutated into insane offensive bloodlust when I took my first life. Or rather, took it again, because the "thing" I "killed" was some security guard with no head. The experience was admittedly exhilarating, a byproduct of the fact that I had never killed or even shot at anything that moved or remotely bore a resemblance to a living creature, and this was not the first liquidation to come; succeeding kills came at a rate much like that at which hotcakes were sold back in the 20th century.

It was still in Delta 2 that the first demon that came at me, the event still a vivid mental photograph of a fearsome beast (with a less-than-fearsome pink carapace) that looked as if it had a lion, a dog, a rhinoceros and a bull as its genetic constituents, plus half a sentry bot for its limbs. I met it in the office of Delta 2's weapons development supervisor, feeding on his body. There was a strange ironic quality to this, thought I, though I didn't quite get what it was. My contemplations would probably have continued had the intimidating thing not charged at me when I entered the room. Fortunately, anterior encounters with fast-moving "undead" polished my reflexiveness and allowed me to transmute the bastard's head into cerulean vapor before it even got close to me. It would have been nice to walk over to its carcass and kick it around a bit but before I could do so, it burst into flames and began _vaporizing_. Obviously _that _was no ordinary incendiary, I thought; even at a thousand degrees Celsius, a human cremation will still leave some ashes – what more a huge, highly resilient predator? And it only started burning _after _I killed it – it should have burned the moment it was hit by the plasma charges. There was something very strange about these creatures. Strange, yes, but destructible, and that attribute was where all relevance laid.

On a desk sat the supervisor's PDA. It had full access to all Delta Labs, plus high-level admittance in the Alpha Labs and Monorail. I uploaded his clearance to my own PDA immediately, elated that I wouldn't have to go through my general access shit anymore. After a bit more observation, I discovered this audio log:

"This is Peter O'Reilly, Delta Labs Sector 2 weapons development supervisor, audio log dated November 12, 2145. I understand the need for safety measures against the growing number of cases of rampancy, but I still don't see why the sentry bots over here need such aggressive programming. Last night, I was with technician Bert Pyllar in the firing range, where a sentry stood guard at the entrance. When we were about to leave, the bot wouldn't accept his security clearance. As he tried to push through, the bot suddenly jumped on him and began chasing him around, shooting all the way. I wanted to help, but had nothing in sight that wouldn't blow the hell out of Pyllar too. Luckily, I saw one of those BFGs sitting on a shelf in the room. The damned thing was so heavy that when I came close to the bot, simply dropping it bashed it to pieces!

"I'd like to make a request to Command for a mass reprogramming here. I don't want to see another such incident in my area again. Ah, anyone who reads this before Sunday, please give Command my humblest apologies for breaking the BFG they sent us three days ago.

"On the lighter side of this occurrence, I've discovered a new use for those big fucking guns besides the indiscriminately vaporizing main blast. Please remind weapons research to add more armor on the bottom; it's really good as a bludgeon.

"In other news, it's so far so good on the plasma gun project up in EnPro. Got a prototype from weapons analyst Theresa Chasar to test in the firing range, and the damn thing really took home the silver (well, of course – only the BFG ever gets gold). Accuracy unlike anything I've ever seen, even beyond that of my fists...only complaint I have is the slowness of the projectiles. I'm moving up to Administration tomorrow to add funding to the project. Maybe we'll see improvements on this already excellent weapon.

"Oh, and no one is allowed to touch the BFG in my office. Sentimental value. (there was a short laugh) But should circumstances require, it's in the locked medicine cabinet in the restroom at the right side from the door. The code is 385. I can't guarantee that it works as it should, but there's plenty of room for error with 15 energy canisters. End log."

"Aha, so there _was _a BFG in Delta 2!" was the first thing that came into my head. The second was an uncontrollable urge to use the restroom – not for excretory purposes, but because I was in desperate need of some "medicine". A BFG-9000 would bring each and every one of the devilish fuckers on the planet to their knees. I punched the three numbers onto the keypad, and there it was, the BFG, a massive firearm with very well-defined specular sheen. This magnificent, albeit a little dented, piece of equipment was so famous and rare that it was an honor to simply _see _one, a distinction I had not obtained until now. Surrounding it were, as the log said, fifteen glowing, viridian energy canisters so powerful that their auxiliary usage was a secondary method for reactor start-up. I took the BFG, along with as many of the canisters as I could (eight, plus the one already in the weapon). I was confident that any following encounters with "zombies" (as I designated the walking dead guys) and demons would be much easier. And I turned out to be right, though following encounters were rare from that point, partially because now that I had universal clearance plus BFG, I was able to take shortcuts by going through normally restricted areas or simply blowing walls up. I got to Delta 1 about twenty minutes after getting through the supervisor's office. There was a long journey ahead, and lower levels had little to no stored ammunition for the plasma gun and the BFG, but more help would come, I reminded myself. My hell march would not be in vain.


	2. Problematic Contiguity

"Hi. My name is James Garrison. I am thirty-seven years old. I like quantum mechanics and complexity, superstring, deconstructionist and existentialist theory. My hobbies include assembling weapons, sentry programming, and blowing the fuck out of alien invaders."

Or something like that. I wrote this somewhere in Delta 1. It was in a certain monorail incident that I realized that these invaders weren't aliens but demons, though from this point on, I shall refer to them as such.

I must apologize for the rough, chunky quality of the occurrences in the past, though I must say that wrote my experiences exactly as they came. There really wasn't much more than encounter after encounter with slow or fast zombies and a single, somewhat banal meeting with a large metaphor for fear. If you wish, abandon these records and use your time elsewhere, or continue and submerge yourself deeper into my narrative.

Stepping into the entrance of Delta Labs Sector 1 introduced me to another sort of demon, a black humanoid with nine or ten eyes. This creature was fast and had the peculiar ability to accrue plasma charges in its hands and toss them around, mostly at me. The arcing balls were slow and easy to dodge, but they were mainly a distraction for the animal, which would leap at me immediately and swipe with knife-like fingers after throwing one of its plasma charges. This tactic was effective, with me sustaining about half a dozen slashes before the thing's midsection disappeared in a bluish cloud. The demon's two remaining fractions proceeded to combust and slowly dissolve to a void, a fact that made me recall the ignition of the dog-thing, which was virtually identical to this one. _How odd_, I thought.

A strange wave of sadness came upon me when the "imp" (I gave this name to the humanoid, as I designated the dog-thing "pinky") was no more, but it quickly gave way to the appearance of more of the things. Lots of them, there was an uncountable mass of them. This was still in Delta reception, by the way, and with the bay door going back to Delta 2 unaccountably locked, and me backed into a corner for lack of maneuvering space, the only choice was a BFG blast, an option that I did not hesitate to take. Seconds before one of the imps drove its claws into my skull, a powerful energy discharge in the form of what is known to weapons analysts as a "green ball of death" was released from its static, cylindrical incarcerator and advanced to the cluster of imps, instantly deconstructing the forward aggressor while killing all others an infinitesimal increment of time later. A blade of silence cut through the cacophony of eerie, monstrous shrieks and collecting plasma. "Close call," went my voice after an apparent eternity, that oddity I said being the favored cliché for a narrow escape until the mid 21st century.

I was relieved to find that the area's consoles accepted me. In other circumstances, I would have not been able to touch Delta-1 computers, but with O'Reilly's clearance, I'd say anything was possible. It should have been possible to send off a distress signal from this point, but for some reason the command was met with invalidity. I accessed the public security cameras, those usable by anybody in Mars City, and discovered that the invaders had taken every colonized section of Mars, including Comms. That explained why I was unable to broadcast; there was no one to mediate a transmission, or there was no tower to relay anything. There was a sentry bot checkpoint in the nearby reactor room, as I learned by passing through a few days ago. A simple answer to the Delta demon problem: Sentry patrol mode. The bot would sweep through passable terrain in the sector, assaulting hostiles with the trademark efficiency of its manufacturers until the next checkpoint, which was, most fortunately, at the end of Delta 1. Sweet!

Activation of the bot revealed a slight problem: The reactor room was locked. That certainly took my smile away. I spied a demolitions rocket launcher on a shelf in reception. A strange place to put that, I observed. Despite having full access to the Delta Labs, I thought that just in case the door was more than locked, a geographical modifier would be useful. A ladder at one corner of the room led to the upper level where the reactor was situated. I scampered up the metal railings and suddenly cognized a loud sound like an explosion. I climbed fully up and turned to the hallway before me. The source was a strange, glowing red sphere that seemed to generate a pentagrammatical figure of equal crimson luminescence on the floor with a yellow bolt of lightning-like energy. The bolt also spawned a different form of demon from those in previous encounters. A skeletal being with glowing eyes, transparent skin and twin R-IRS homer "Simpson" rocket launchers (being a munitions expert, I should know) shoulder-mounted was slowly advancing. Then came a familiar sound, that being the shrill whir of the Simpsons' capacitors, whose prototypes and final rendition came into my hands and were both deconstructed and tested. This sound meant that the skeleton, demon, whatever it was, was preparing to blow its target's guts out. That was not good.

Waking up with a headache isn't uncommon, but I can safely state that waking up with a full-body ache is. The memory was intense, a short chase scene where I desperately tried to get inside two Simpson rockets' turn radii, and succeeded in crashing into both missiles. Luckily, the point of contact was the same as that where the skele- oh fuck it, I'll call it bone-ass. Luckily, the point of contact was the same as that where bone-ass stood, and it reluctantly accepted the majority of the impact damage. J It's not surprising how I was only out for a few minutes.

A few meters away, I saw how wonderful my resolution to bring the rocket launcher was. The reactor room wasn't locked; the door was fused to the wall. BOOM! went the silly piece of metal. AAUUGGHH!! went I. A new demon encounter in minutes. Whoo-hoo.

Or not. This thing looked like what an imp wants to be when it grows up. A muscular, humanoid leviathan brought its fist upon my fragile human architecture and most likely broke a rib. Its attack pattern progressed to an azure plasma formulation in its right hand, a powerful little thing that had no problem at all in reaching my body, which, I might add, did not like extreme heat very much. Two more balls, and my vision was beginning to blur. Dying? Maybe. I would turn out in the same way as that corpse next to me, clutching a BFG to the very end of the road. _Except I wouldn't be holding a BFG_.

The thought was utterly imbecilic.

I rolled, took the man's weapon and charged the BFG to two panels, and voila! instant pot roast. Had I hesitated a moment longer, my head would have been a thin organic paste on the wall.

There was the sentry bot, a charred, green hunk of metal now completely worthless except for its mounted .75 cal automatic. The weapon was extremely versatile, far more powerful than the Mach-5 chaingun and was surprisingly lightweight. A good find it was, but sadly its ammunition was a proprietary design patented by the sentry bot's makers. I would only be able to retrieve more from other sentry bots or, if I'm lucky, a repair facility. Nevertheless, it was well-stocked with about a thousand rounds, and, with its power, would only need to be used sparingly.

My euphoria was beginning to be evidenced. The irrationalistic contemplations going through my head were pointing in the direction of insanity. Killing is a lot of fun, and perhaps too much fun, like drugs. I felt it reasonable to start avoiding firefights, not so much as to preserve my life but to prevent, ahem, rampancy.

There wasn't a single living person in Delta Labs Sector 1 besides myself. What human forms remained were either corpses or undead, and I tell you, reader, there were a lot of undead in Delta Labs 1. A ventilation shaft I was forced to travel through showed me how much of these zombies hid between walls. Cleaning was a simple matter of streaming plasma bolts into the shaft, but the heat melted the walls and dropped me into, oddly enough, my destination, the monorail station. Unfortunately, the drop was not very merciful as I fell on my broken rib and felt a little _crunch_ of bones. "Oh damn, I don't have time for this…" I moaned, more in frustration than in pain.

I couldn't get up anymore, so I crawled to a health station on the wall and tried to regenerate my bones. It worked, a little. My ability to locomote was rehabilitated, but the pain clung on. I decided to rest for the night (morning? it was only 0430). Incredibly dangerous, you might say. Well, I rigged all possible entry points with a grenade set to blow if the locked doors were somehow opened without authorization (I assumed that if the doors were to be unlocked properly, there would be a living person doing the work). The night passed quickly and I work up feeling, quite simply, great. I disengaged the booby traps and opened the doors to the monorail. It was a feel-good moment, watching the gates open and let in the Martian sunrise – however, at that point, I remembered that before one actually got to the transit system, there was an enclosed security checkpoint. "Martian sunrise?" was my first, agitated thought. _"OH SHIT!" _was the next, and at that point, the air took a precipitous egress out of the reception room, leaving me with a pair of half-empty lungs. There it was before me, the train that I would normally not be able to see from this point. The security checkpoint was completely destroyed.


End file.
